People Falling

Who fucking cares that the towers fell? It's this image drilled into our minds that this is something terrible. We see it over and over, a plane fly into a building, a massive explosion, and fast forward to metal weakening and collapsing. So what?

That is the wrong image. We should not mourn a couple buildings. It's actually a bit awe-inspiring. The reshaping of the world so dramatically.

I've not yet found the image that we should all see instead. It is three thousand people standing in the air, a human tower stretching up to the sky. And then more people run into them. And they all fall down. People falling. That is the horror.

A bit of metal falling down is an economic waste, but we can deal with that easily enough. We can rebuild it. It's the human tower that we cannot rebuild. It is the human tower falling, two two human towers falling that is the true loss.

Sometimes I think we lose sight of that. We hear about thousand of people and it is a statistic. We see a building fall and it looks not much different than the controlled demolitions we sometimes see on local news*. But one person falling from the sky, a thousand times over, and again and again, that is something different. I'm sure we've all fallen and presumably all of us landed on something soft enough that we didn't die. But on the way down, we felt that fear, that abrupt change, a primal fear, the animal part of the brain surging up to tell us that something is very wrong. We were lucky enough to stop gently enough. If we instead were in the sky, standing higher than we ever have, and then we fell...

I wish just a couple buildings had fallen down, ten years ago.